Last night’s SOTU speech brought to mind a particular occasion from about a decade or so ago. Secretary Powell, his chief-of-staff Larry Wilkerson, and I were sitting in the Secretary’s inner office, about seven p.m. on what must have been October 9 or 10, 2003, just informally reviewing the day’s events, when Powell asked the two of us: “Why is [Treasury Secretary] John Snow in Beijing?” I could see Larry, one of the most earnest, well intentioned, selfless, and patriotic men I have ever met, start to skull down on an answer, supposing that it must have something to do with the intricacies of currency manipulation issues, trade, and the other policy matters that come in train. I preempted, asking merely, “Because the President sent him there, just as a symbolic gesture, to keep his domestic critics at bay, right?” “That’s right”, said Powell, smiling. This was about politics, not policy.
Alas, reading through my emails and data feeds this morning, what do I see but an ocean of earnest pundits, academics, and assorted policy wonks telling me why one or another of the President’s proposals on junior colleges, capital gains taxes, and the rest are either the most brilliant idea since sliced salami or else a counterproductive belly-flop in the making. Some of these folks go into considerable detail. They are so earnest I can barely make up my mind whether to laugh or cry.
They all need to relax. For better or worse, none of this stuff is going to happen. This should have been obvious from taking a gander at the Administration’s budget proposal earlier in the week. This was the most left-wing, class-warfare budget of the entire Administration, flung right into the maw of a newly solid Republican Congress. If these proposals are really so dear to the governing heart of the President and his closest advisers and supporters, then why did they wait more than six years to tell us about them? Because, folks, this budget and last night’s speech have nothing to do with governance, and everything to do with political posturing looking to 2016. This is the permanent campaign at its purest. This is about popularity and winning, not about policy ideas and governance. This is a bit like class-president elections in high school, only these folks are not still in high school.
It’s sort of amazing to me, after what we have witnessed since January 2009, that anyone could mistake the essence. Consider just the Affordable Care Act, essentially an effort to address not health care, but only how to pay for health care by shifting resources away from Medicare and toward an expanded Medicaid. It took a lot of smoke and mirrors to get people to believe in and support this maneuver, but we are earnest and so it passed. Why were so many predictions about its impact “mistaken”, and why was the rollout such a disaster? Because the whole thing was about constituency-tending, not about governing; about impression-management, not about truth. One says what it is necessary to say, and one leaves all the policy-implementation details to the bureaucrats. There’s always time to clean up any broken china later.
The ACA did not turn out to be such shrewd politics after all, of course, given that the Democratic dive in the midterms had no little bit to do with the negative popular reaction to it. But that’s not the point really. The point is that, like our society in general these days, along with its business class and especially its bankers, the President and hence his Administration focus relentlessly on relatively short-term advantage—and that in rather narrow partisan terms. It would take an act of heroic courage from him to do otherwise in the present elite “flip-it” environment; and certainly Barack Obama is not the first President in recent decades to think and act like this. The President reminds me sometimes of the Harold Hill character in Music Man, who sells the town the instruments for the orchestra that will never be, collects the money, and then quietly catches the night train to parts unknown. Except that Robert Preston was much more entertaining than Barack Obama will ever be, or even than Bill Clinton ever was.
How do these guys keep getting away with this stuff? Well, because as I said we Americans in general are pretty earnest, God bless us; as a Protestant-sired political culture, we’re not like the lapsed-Catholic French, who stare in wide-eyed wonderment at our credulity. Unlike them, we actually still think our senior politicians really care about what’s best for the country as a whole, looking to the long future. Of course a lot of them do care, in theory, but they nevertheless manage to harmonize the sordid tactical demands of the moment with the better America always on the horizon, defined as a point far in the distance that continues to recede as you approach it. Just as, in the words of “Engine Charlie” Wilson back in 1953, “What’s good for the country is good for General Motors, and vice versa”, American politicians have virtually all managed to persuade themselves that what’s good for their party, and for themselves, is necessarily, eventually, somehow, good for the country. This qualifies as an act of faith, but not of the transcendent sort.
Typical Americans are oodles more earnest than typical American politicians, whose cynicism is both learned and earned. We still say that we, each of us, want to leave the world a better place than we found it, and most of us actually mean it. Most of us, God bless us very, very much, are locked perpetually in some sort of Jimmy Stewart role, illustrating in a particularly American way William James’s famous remark that “we believe everything that we can, and would believe everything if only we could.” We want to believe. These days especially, it makes us feel cozier in the face of the radical and galloping structural uncertainty in our economy and in our culture. Show us a hook, a line, and a sinker; we’re always hungry for solace from democratically anointed authority. And that’s partly why we get the sort of flipster politicians we tend to get.
The other part of the explanation is trickier, but probably more important. A little history may be instructive to introduce the point.
George Washington and John Adams gave (what became known after FDR as) State of the Union speeches because the Constitution (Article II, Section 3) requires a presidential accounting “from time to time.” Jefferson discontinued the process, preferring to satisfy the Constitutional requirement with a written statement. So it remained until Woodrow Wilson revived the speechifying. He did so, most historians agree, because of the advent of radio. Only Congress could listen to Washington and Adams, and before 1913 Americans read the President’s words. But tens of millions could now listen to St. Woodrow, whose capacity for self-regard exceeded all then-known boundaries, reaching, as far as he was concerned, all the way to Heaven. Since then, changes in technology have multiplied the political power of the speech by orders of magnitude. No politician-become-President in his right mind would forego the opportunity.
Note, however, that to watch the President talking on a screen is not only a run-of-the-mill media event, but that doing so requires the viewer to absorb and process mediated images. At the risk of insulting your intelligence, allow me to point out that watching television, or any electronic screen, is not the same as watching a bird in a tree, or looking at someone with whom one is engaged in face-to-face conversation. You can watch animation and superheroes doing, well, heroic things in mediated images, not to speak of technically dazzling commercials; one hopes one cannot do such things with direct images. (If you’re driving your car one evening and the traffic lights all turn blue, like in that old Jimi Hendrix song, and Elmer Fudd is driving the car that just passed you going the other way, you have probably been up to something sketchy.)
Why does this matter? Quite aside from the fact that mediated images may be and often are staged and manipulated for purposes of impression management, the human brain processes mediated images differently from direct ones. Our capacity to discern what is real from what is not gets a bit blurred; our critical facilities get at least marginally disoriented. That’s why the Sanka company many years ago hired Robert Young—the actor who starred in “Father Knows Best” and “Marcus Welby, MD”—to sell its product wearing a white medical coat, armed with stethoscope and pointer. Could TV watchers not distinguish between Robert Young the actor and Robert Young’s roles as ideal father and error-free doctor? You figure it out.
Not that any President (so far) has tried to manipulate his audience through technical artifice—that’s not the issue. The issue is that as Americans expose themselves to an ever-greater proportion of mediated images to real ones, there is a non-trivial possibility that the technology itself allows for more effective wool-pulling; or, even assuming no intent to manipulate, more self-wooly-eyed behavior than might have heretofore been thought possible. In short, we earnest Americans, who want to believe in the wisdom, decency, and integrity of our elected leaders, can more easily than ever make our wishes come true. Could it be that the real state of the union has something or other to do with that?
